With the increasing incidence of critical vulnerabilities on next generation firewalls, vendors and their customers face significant challenges in keeping up with firmware patches, mitigating exploitation risks, and safeguarding their edge devices and organizations.

As an adversary, if you land on a next generation firewall, what could you do next to further compromise the target environment?

This talk addresses that question by examining how attackers can exploit weaknesses and overlooked features in these firewalls for maximum impact. A little-known detail is revisited: Palo Alto’s default master key (often left unchanged) can be leveraged to decrypt stored configuration secrets, exposing credentials and cryptographic keys previously thought to be secure. The speaker demonstrates how a compromised NGFW can be transformed from a security appliance into a valuable platform for credential harvesting, internal reconnaissance, and lateral movement. Beyond extracting sensitive data, an adversary can abuse built-in functionality to move deeper into the environment in ways most defenders have never considered. The speaker also details how the clientless VPN feature can be abused for internal network mapping, and how a threat actor may inject malicious code into VPN login portals to harvest credentials.

The strategies and techniques described in this talk are intended to equip both offensive and defensive security professionals with new approaches for targeting and protecting next generation firewalls. Understanding how perimeter devices can be subverted, and adopting proactive measures to harden and monitor them, is critical to maintaining the integrity of modern network environments.